Introducing Pillar Posts: Easy-to-Create Hubs for Topics

Craig Kanalley
Thu, 30 Nov 2023 20:42:43 +0000
Ai, Artificial intelligence, Search, Editorial workflows

We’re really excited about a new type of post in our Entry Editor called Pillar Posts. Once enabled for your account, you’ll find them as an option under Posts ("Add Pillar Post").

The concept is a destination page or hub that surfaces lots of content you’ve produced on a single topic in one place. It might link to 15 posts you’ve done on a topic, or 50 posts, or more. It’s up to you.

It’s driven by an AI search engine that looks through your entire archives of content for a certain keyword of your choice. Because it is AI-powered, it is extremely good at finding the best related content for any given search term. You can also do variants of that same search term to drill down into different subtopics and surface more content.

For example, your first search might be “holidays” and that will pull up a lot of great articles, but your second search might be “holiday shopping” and that will bring up another subset of articles, though related. You can classify the articles accordingly with subheadings in your Pillar Post.

Here’s a look at the AI search in action. It’s to the left of your typical Entry Editor, allowing you to browse for related articles as you produce content on the right:

It has a beautiful drag-and-drop UI, so you can seamlessly bring AI-recommended articles into Particles using our Assembler tool:

When you drag an article in, the headline will populate along with the main image and text from the article. You can customize any of that text or media on the fly, but if you want to simply drag, drop, and move on to the next article, it’s incredibly easy to do so.

This allows you to quickly and easily populate lots of related articles for any given topic.

As you build out a Pillar Post, you might do a 2-column or 3-column layout in our Assembler tool to switch things up:

This creates a fantastic user experience, allowing readers to quickly scan lots of articles for an article that interests them.

The possibilities are endless with Pillar Posts. You may find ways to use them that we haven’t thought of yet, so we’re really excited for you to give them a go! Try this out and let us know what you think.